The Feeling That Doesn't Reach
by Aquamarine Shadows
Summary: A tale of recovering from heartbreak— Kanae finds her place in the world and learns to love again after her last encounter with Tono Takaki. It all started with a fateful encounter with a boy on the beach. KanaexOC
1. Breaking Away

**A/N: I don't own the beautiful work of art that is known as Five Centimeters Per Second. It belongs to Makoto Shinkai. :3 Prompts are taken from a 121 drabble challenge I found a long time ago, but these are not drabbles. :) PS, Please forgive me for the incessant quotes that will be put at the beginning and end of each chapter, but I am madly in love with the works of Sylvia Plath (as morbid as that sounds) and cannot help myself.**

_There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love._

-Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

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**[1] Breaking Away**

Have you ever thought you found "the one"? Someone you could imagine spending the rest of your life with, and someone who you couldn't see yourself without? If so, then you could probably understand the feelings of Sumida Kanae.

Tono Takaki always stared off into the horizon in a way that was troubling to her. He was kind to her, and it made her feel special until she remembered that he was nice to everyone. Tono was the type of person who always smiled at everyone, even when they weren't so pleasant in return. The pain that Kanae felt when she saw him with his nose buried in his phone or trying to see a faraway land that he loved was unbearable. Tono had the eyes of a daydreamer, but buried under the hopeful look in those wonderful brown eyes were hints of grief and heartache. She remembered one of the first times she saw his emotions slip. They rode home from school together, then made a stop at the convenience store for drinks. When she came out of the store, she saw Tono writing a message with a somber expression.

The day that she realized that he was wanting something very far away was one of the last times Kanae ever saw Tono. She had finally worked up the courage to tell him how she felt, still hoping that he felt the same way. They rode their scooters home from school and made their usual stop at the convenience store. After her scooter wouldn't start again, they walked home together from the store. Her heart started to beat fast, and she tried to bring herself to say the words she wanted to say for so long. As he walked with his back to her, Kanae realized that she would never reach him. She wanted to be the one he confided his feelings in. She wanted to hear what was on his mind –what he was really thinking. At school, Tono was open and sincere to everyone, but she knew by those brief moments when she caught him staring into the sunset or typing messages on his phone that there was more to his feelings than the facade of cheer and hope he put on at school. Even as she stood beside him, he was too far away for her to reach. Whatever it was that he was searching for in that far distance, she could not give it to him.

He was never looking at her, only past her.

_"I wish he would just stop,"_ she thought._ "Why are you so kind, Tono? Why are you so kind to me? Will you ever tell me what that distant look is about? Will you ever open yourself up? What are you thinking about? Why did you make me fall in love with you?"_

She listened to the breeze rustling the leaves of the trees. As the birds chirped from their nests and the squirrels chattered, she imagined that they were all just laughing at her —that the entire world was laughing at her. The butterflies in her stomach from merely looking at Tono seemed to become frozen and then shattered to pieces. She squeezed the handle bar of her scooter in her as if to crush it and bit her lip. Kanae fixed her eyes on the dirt road ahead of her. She didn't dare look at Tono because she knew if she caught his eye, she would begin to cry, and she would be unable to stop herself. Despite her efforts to hold it in, the tears brimmed and slid down her face like droplets of water over the sides of a glass too full. For every tear that escaped her eyes, she regretted having gone home with Tono ten times more. She repeatedly apologized for the letting him witness her fall to pieces.

The day she gave up on Tono was the day Kanae fell off of the great surfboard of happiness. On top of not being able to catch a wave for the past six months, she realized that her only reason to never give up on what she loved the most quickly slipped through her fingers like sand.

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_"To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream."_

—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar


	2. Crossing Paths

**A/N: I don't own Five Centimeters Per Second. :)**

_"I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."_

**—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar**

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**[2] Crossing Paths**

****If you were to ask Kanae what she loved most about surfing, she would reply with, "the way the ocean listens." When she was a child, she remembered holding a conch shell to her ear to try and hear the ocean, but now the ocean listened to her instead. When she surfed, she didn't feel pressure or stress. The ocean didn't question her. It didn't make her decide what she wanted for her future. She could wash away her fears in the Pacific waters. When she surfed, Kanae was free —free to choose how to live, free to express herself, and free to forget about reality. Even after falling off of her board, she still felt relief.

The first time she saw Kei riding the waves, she was sitting on her board, swaying back and forth with the waves, and watching the sun set. His soaked, chocolate brown hair nearly covered his eyes. He noticed her spying on him and smiled, but then he lost his balance, and his board slipped out from underneath him. After he floated back to the top of the water, he flopped back onto his board and paddled toward her.

"Nice view, huh?" he said.

"Yeah, it is." She smiled a sad smile and briefly looked into his eyes before shifting her attention to the setting sun.

"The only thing I love more than watching the sunset is looking at the stars." He beamed at the colors in the sky, ranging from purple to orange. The patterns of the clouds above showed an incredible similarity to the sight of the crashing waves on the beach. Kanae rocked her feet back and forth with the steady crashing of the waves and tilted her head to the side to look at this boy. He snapped out of his thoughts as she shifted on her board.

"I apologize for not introducing myself. My name is Hamasaki Kei." He tilted his head as a bow while he squirmed to find a comfortable position on his board.

"My name is Sumida Kanae. It's nice to meet you." She returned the bow.

He noticed the very faint look of gloom cast over her face when she introduced herself. "You seem troubled," he said. "We may have just met, but if you have something bothering you, I've got plenty of time to listen."

She started to tear up and laid back on her board, looking at the newly visible stars in the sky. "You see, there was this boy."

"Ah, that seems to be the root of most problems in life," he said with a wink. "Tell me more." With that began a long conversation of Kanae's infatuation with Tono Takaki and the distance of his heart from hers. She told him everything from when she first met him in junior high to the day she realized she couldn't give him what he needed. She told him every bit of feeling in between and everything she'd felt since the last time she saw him –the pressure to decide what she wanted to do; the confidence in herself that she had lost; the inability to feel anything, yet at the same time, her inability to stop feeling everything. She told him all she had kept bottled in the darkness of her soul.

"I'm sorry to hear about all of the trouble you've been having. I think that this Tono guy doesn't know what he's missing out on. You're such a cute girl, you know? You should smile more."

Kanae gave him a small, genuinely happy smile. "Thank you."

"Let's go back to the shore," he suggested, and she followed. She grabbed her towel and a bottle of water from her backpack hanging on the handle of her scooter, then sat down next to him on the sand with the towel around her shoulders. "I'm sure you've heard it before, but a lost love isn't the end of the world." His face grew serious. "I was once madly in love with this girl. We were together for a year. We even had an apartment together, but one day she went back to her ex-boyfriend."

She forgot about her problems for a little bit and became more interested in Kei's life. "What happened after that?"

"Well, it's a long story of love, loss, desperation, and finding myself. I don't mind sharing if you don't mind listening." She urged him to go ahead, and he poured his heart out to her. He told her of his part time job delivering groceries, his friends who were down on their luck, how he took them into his apartment, and how everything fell apart. He spoke of his ex-girlfriend who supported him after he lost his job and his home, the odd jobs he did for money, and of all the soul-searching he did over the past several months. Hearing Kei's story made Kanae's problems seem as insignificant as the existence of earth to the entire universe, but the way he spoke to her comforted her. They talked until after the sun set and even later into the night.

Kanae checked her phone for the time and gasped at how late it was. "I am going to have to go," she apologized. "I have to go into the school counselor's office tomorrow morning and talk about my plans for college."

Kei beamed at her. "Well, good luck, and don't let them get you down tomorrow!"

She turned around after attaching her board to her scooter to just barely catch a glimpse of his bright smile and grinned. "Thanks! Have a good night!" She waved and willed her eyes to look into his, but they strained to turn away from him.

Hamasaki Kei: he seemed worth befriending.

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_"So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them."_

**—Sylvia Plath**


	3. Friendship

A/N: I don't own Five Centimeters Per Second.

_"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."_

_**― Eleanor Roosevelt**_

**[3] Friendship**

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The school guidance counselor took a seat at his desk with a stern look in his eye. "Sumida-san, I don't think you realize how important it is that you turn in your college and career questionnaire," he said. "Graduation is coming sooner than you can count on, and you don't want to be the only one of your classmates stuck with no clue as to where you want to go or what you want to do with your life." Kanae pretended to listen with him with great interest, though in reality she was merely drowning out the sound of his voice with the tune of Quadra's "Get it by your hands" in her mind. [1]

Then she was caught.

"Sumida-san, are you even listening to me?" No answer. "Sumida-san?"

"Ah, yes, sensei. I'm sorry." She bowed to the old man apologetically. "My mind is on the possibilities of what I can do after graduation," she lied. In reality, she was wondering if she would see Kei at the beach again. She'd never been so fascinated by the life of another so easily. Hamasaki Kei was the exact definition of complexity.

The counselor continued on with his lecture, and Kanae continued to space out in spite of being scolded moments ago. "I'll need your college and career questionnaire by the end of the week," he finally concluded.

"Yes, sir." She gathered up her book bag and stood to leave.

"That is all. You may go now. I hope you take a serious amount of time to reflect on yourself and what you truly want in this life, Sumida-san. Good luck."

"Thank you, sensei," she said as she bowed, then slowly trudged to her first class.

* * *

The lack of extra sleep from waking up early to see the counselor in the morning made it very difficult for Kanae to full-heartedly participate in her daily activities. The last thing the counselor said to her kept running through her mind. She had always pushed thoughts of her future to the back of her mind, as if to keep herself from facing the reality of growing up. Growing up was a fear for Kanae. She feared having to face the challenges of adulthood without the knowledge of how to handle them. Periodically throughout her classes her mind started to drift to reflections of herself as a person. What was she good at? What did she really want to be when she grew up? What kind of places did she want to see? Would life in a larger city suit her more so than life in a small village? There are many possibilities to the answers she could find to these questions, but it would take more than a few hours of pondering her place in life to help her make a clear decision about her future. She disliked having to conform to the high school's standard of making students decide so early what their future plans were. All of the other students had decided because their parents determined it for them, but Kanae's sister never pushed her to be one thing or the other. It felt condemning ―like whatever decision she made, she would be indefinitely stuck with. What if she changed her mind? What would she do then?

What do you do when there are so many things that interest you in this world? It certainly is not possible to obtain an education and career path in every specific field that interests you.

Thanks to her incessant pondering, the day moved along much more quickly than she expected it to. Out of habit, she found herself riding her scooter immediately to the beach, rather than going home to even get her surfboard or leave her school bag in her room. Kanae did not feel like talking to her sister just then. In fact, there were few people on the planet in which she found herself willing to talk to at that moment. She parked her scooter off to the side of the road and took off her shoes before walking down to the shoreline. She walked up and down the beach for at least two hours, at which point the darkness almost completely took over the sky. Kanae finally sat down close to the water so that the tide could wash over her feet as it swept in and out. She watched the stars gradually become brighter and clearer in the night sky.

"Sumida-san?"

She sharply inhaled but then relaxed as she realized that Kei was the one behind her. "Hello, Hamasaki-san." She held her hand to her heart as she recovered from the surprise.

"I apologize. I didn't mean to scare you," he said. "You're out here awfully late, and you're not even surfing today. Is everything okay?" She studied the genuine look in his eyes from the light of the moon and nodded.

"Everything is fine, thank you. I am just lost in my own thoughts." She smiled a small smile.

"You should be careful doing that. It's dangerous to think so intensely. You'll melt your brain," he joked.

"Hamasaki-san, may I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"Have you ever... have you ever wondered what your purpose in life is?" He sat down on the sand next to her.

"I have. It takes a lot of time to reflect, and the answer isn't always very obvious," he said in a very serious tone. "Life isn't that simple. If it's your future you're wondering about, I'd say you still have time to decide. You're very young still, and the amount of things you are capable of are endless. I don't agree with schools forcing students to choose their paths in life so early, but I do believe you have the power to change your own path."

Kei's words eased Kanae's worries about her own future, though she knew how the adults and her peers spoke of her indecisiveness. The disapproving looks from her indecision always bothered her. "I just feel so pressured that I can't even wrap my head around graduation itself."

"Everyone does. Even I did," he admitted with a sheepish grin. "Before I graduated, I told my school counselor that I wanted to study marketing. I got accepted to Nagoya University of Commerce and Business, and I even had top grades while I was there. That's when I started working my part time job. After everything that happened, I don't know what I want out of my life anymore." The two sat in silence for a short while.

"Look, Sumida-san: it's a shooting star!" he pointed out.

Kanae smiled and wished to herself that he would be able to soon find his place in life again. She understood the social pressure he must feel when other adults looked at him and what he'd been doing with his life thus far.

"I hope he becomes happy," she thought.

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_"In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit."_

_**―Albert Schweitzer**_

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[1.] Eureka seveN reference: take it or leave it. ;)


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